Opinions varied among the comments received in the FCC’s June 22 NPRM on ATSC 3.0, five years into its voluntary deployment (see 2207060019), about whether the technology scored a hit with consumers. There appeared to be consensus in the comments posted Tuesday in docket 16-142 about keeping in place for now the requirement that TV broadcasters transmit their primary 3.0 video streams in compliance with ATSC's A/322 physical layer protocol standard. The A/322 requirement is due to expire March 6 unless the FCC reinstates it.
MPEG LA and InterDigital urged the FCC not to get involved in regulating patent licensing for ATSC 3.0 amid evidence that the free market was working well and showing no signs of license irregularities or abuses, in comments posted Monday in docket 16-142. The comments were due Monday in the FCC’s NPRM on all aspects of the ATSC 3.0 deployment, including whether 3.0-essential patents are being licensed on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms (see 2207060019).
Universal Display shaved $25 million to $50 million off its May 5 revenue forecast for 2022, saying Thursday it now expects to finish the year with a top line of $600 million, plus or minus $10 million. The supplier of OLED technology and materials downgraded its guidance after customers abruptly began reducing their order forecasts “as we approached the summer,” it said.
Qorvo, in fiscal Q1 ended July 2, fell $13 million short of its “minimum purchase” obligations under the “capacity reservation agreement” it signed a year ago with an unnamed foundry supplier at the peak of the semiconductor crunch (see 2208040009), said the chipmaker’s 10-Q filing at the SEC Thursday after the markets closed. The agreement authorized the supplier to deduct the “amount of the purchase shortfall,” $13 million, from the deposit that Qorvo prepaid to initiate the agreement, said the 10-Q. Qorvo estimates it will incur additional shortfalls of $86 million over the remaining life of the contract, it said. The agreement obligated Qorvo to buy $1.2 billion of wafers through the end of calendar 2025. The chipmaker depicted the purchase shortfall as reflective of how customer demand in the recent quarter had declined abruptly.
There’s “much work to be done” in Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans to roll out HBO Max and Discovery+ as a “new combined offering under a single brand,” said Jean-Briac Perrette, president-CEO, global streaming and games, on a Q2 earnings call Thursday. “We are determined to get it right, which will take a bit of time,” he said. His team has developed a clear road map to migrate HBO Max and Discovery+ “onto one tech stack” that overcomes the “shortcomings” of both services, he said. HBO Max “has a competitive feature set, but has had performance and customer issues,” while Discovery+ “has best-in-class performance and consumer ratings, but more limited features,” he said. The combined service will launch in the U.S. next summer, and Latin America will follow later in 2023. European markets with HBO Max will launch in early 2024, with “key Asia Pacific territories” coming later in 2024, he said. “This idea of expensive films going direct to streaming, we cannot find an economic case for it,” said CEO David Zaslav on the decision to cancel this year’s HBO Max release of the $90 million feature film Batgirl. “We’ve been out in the town talking about our commitment to the theatrical exhibition and the theatrical window,” said Zaslav. “Our focus will be on theatrical, and when we bring the theatrical films to HBO Max, we find they have substantially more value.”
Revenue growth of 162% to $1.17 billion gave AMC Entertainment its best second quarter in three years, said CEO Adam Aron on a Thursday earnings call. “People came back to movie theaters in droves” in Q2, including 59 million globally who paid to see feature films at AMC theaters, increasing 168% from the same 2021 quarter, he said. Aron thinks Hollywood “has realized again how much money can be made by releasing movies in theaters exclusively first,” he said. It’s also well known that “the share price of some major streaming companies started to take a hit, and they started to lose subscribers,” he said. “There's a lot of speculation that while the market might be big enough to support one streamer or two streamers or maybe even three stainless, it’s not going to support 10 streamers or more.” Taken all together, the CEO thinks Hollywood “is turning away from streaming,” as is Wall Street, he said.
The COVID-19 lockdowns in China, plus the war in Ukraine, global supply chain disruptions and other factors “negatively impacted the global demand environment within a short period of time,” said Qorvo Interim Chief Financial Officer Grant Brown on an earnings call Wednesday for fiscal Q1 ended July 2.
Though Rent-A-Center’s Q2 trends were down compared with the “stimulus-enhanced” 2021 results, “we are encouraged by the performance of the business in the second quarter, given the very different and more challenging macro environment we're experiencing this year,” said CEO Mitch Fadel on an earnings call Thursday. Q2 revenue declined 10.3% to $1.1 billion, slightly above the high end of RAC’s May 4 guidance range, RAC said. “While we executed well in the areas of the business that we could control, external factors like inflation and economic growth and discretionary income worsened during the first half of the year,” said Fadel. As Q2 progressed, “we began to see indications that macro-weakness causing lease volumes and payment behavior to trend below our assumptions for the second half of the year,” he said. Lease-to-own historically “has demonstrated countercyclical attributes, maintaining better top-line and loss-rate trends during economic downturns” than more conventional retailers, he said.
Paramount Global is a big believer in ad-supported streaming, and “that others are following our lead is really a validation of the thesis we've had for years,” said CEO Bob Bakish on a Q2 earnings call Thursday. “There will be incremental options in the market” once Disney+ and Netflix launch their ad tiers, “but really, competition is nothing new,” said Bakish. Paramount+ added 4.9 million global subscribers in Q2 and revenue grew 120%, said Bakish. Paramount+ was the top premium service in the U.S. in terms of new sign-ups and net subscriber additions for Q2 and 2022 to date, said Bakish, citing unnamed third-party data. It’s also the most popular premium streaming service in the U.S. among service “switchers,” he said. That means people who dropped a paid streaming subscription in the past 12 months were more likely to add Paramount+ than any other service, he said. Paramount+ ended the quarter with 43.3 million subscribers, factoring in the 1.2 million accounts that were removed in Russia after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, said Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra.
EBay’s second-quarter revenue of $2.42 billion was down 6% year over year but slightly exceeded the high end of the company’s May 4 guidance range, reported the company Wednesday. EBay's "focus category payments" and advertising initiatives helped offset the impact of unfavorable market conditions, said CEO Jamie Iannone on a quarterly earnings call.